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I walked awestruck for days afterward, through cities
broken by raw, violent revelation. Diffusing like smoke, the
dead, dying, sick, and insane choked streets and alleyways,
filled skyscrapers repurposed to madhouses, and tumbled
into graves as deep and wide as canyons. I wandered for
weeks through the fallout of the global nightmare, my
family and I marveling at the new-world absurdities, living
beneath a sky that had indeed proven capable of falling. I
only watched—approvingly, I confess—as mankind, on a
scale never known, collapsed beneath the combined weight
of truth and mystery.
Religions burned to the ground almost overnight, as
neither gods nor their books could ever again be trusted.
Science fell to the gutters, wasted to bones, starved thin and
wan for lack of sustaining facts and figures. Collective man
was naked beneath the moon once more. To be sure, it was
many years before mankind recovered some measure of its
former contrivances and doldrums, but even then it walked
a doubtful path between the tombstones of that lost year, the
year of the Great Darkness.
There is darkness in everything, I have since concluded.
The explicit variety that falls from the sky at night may
be perhaps a sort of externalized counterpart of the more
metaphysical brand that lurks the other side of our skin. I
believe it was the joining of these two types, indeed their
fusion, which led to the Great Darkness of 1999. This union
resulted in nothing less than the construction of a Dream—
where mind and matter conspire to supplant reality. And
while no one remembers precisely what happened during
our year-long blackout (forgetfulness has always been the
bane of dreams), its echo still plays out across the world,
tolling a dissonance of broken faiths—in solid worlds, and
even the prospect of certain spiritual enterprises.
It was this metaphysical darkness—the kind slinking just
out of sight, more wondrous than its traditional counterpart—
that I’d always shared a special kinship. Along with its
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